He made close acquaintance with phenomena he had before known but darkly - the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things.
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Of Nature, by the gentle agency
Of natural objects, led me on to feel
For passions that were not my own, and think
(At random and imperfectly indeed)
On man, the heart of man, and human life.
Therefore, although it be a history
Homely and rude, I will relate the same
For the delight of a few natural hearts;
And, with yet fonder feeling, for the sake
Of youthful Poets, who among these hills
Will be my second self when I am gone.
William Wordsworth, “Michael”
Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold wrote in remembrance of William Wordsworth in “Memorial Verses April 1850” following the death of the poet: “He laid us as we lay at birth / On the cool flowery lap of earth” (48-49). All poetry pertaining to the natural world following the year 1850 intrinsically hails from the lifetime of lines composed by William Wordsworth over the course of his eighty years of existence. He heavily influenced the later work of Victorian poet Thomas Hardy, who in his preface to The Dynasts quotes Wordsworth directly, remarking upon the supernatural spectators “of this unintelligible world,” he writes: “They are intended to be taken by the reader for what they may be worth as contrivances of the fancy merely. Their doctrines are but tentative, and are advanced with little eye to a systemized philosophy warranted to lift ‘the burthen of the mystery’ of this unintelligible world” (i). Stephen Gill writes in Wordsworth and the Victorians that during the Victorian era, “Wordsworth the radical … was, of course, unknown to the world at large, but the voice of Wordsworth the conservative-radical, the humanitarian and morally concerned Wordsworth, was listened to with increasing respect” such that “the later Wordsworth became a cultural icon, to be visited, written about, and by disciples, revered” (3). Wordsworth’s contributions to the world of nature's poetics are monumental and function as the fountainhead of Romantic thought. His presence remains unmatched as the definitive nature poet. Wordsworth’s verse is most commonly known for its depictions of human emotion evoked by the natural world: a culmination of personal expression, mourning of lost youth, awe of the nature that surrounded him (and, in different contexts, us all), and a glimmer of surprisingly astute ecological observation. As much as he is alternately honored and reviled as the received nature poet, Wordsworth is marked by his speculative attitude in regards to the spirituality and epistemology he received in nature. Over the course of his career he posed questions directed to the universe, to the intricacies of life and death, and to the meaning of knowledge. In everything from his published poetry to his personal correspondences it is evident that he did not necessarily fear death, but that he feared the loss that accompanies age in the natural passage of human life. Jonathan Bate expresses this attitude in his 2020 biography of Wordsworth, Radical Wordsworth, writing that “Wordsworth’s way of dealing with loss was always to find restorative power in nature, however bleak the scene” (36). For Wordsworth nature was a source of solace, a force which frequently expressed a certain vitality within its restorative power.
In comparison to Wordsworth’s Romantic nature poetry and sensibility, Victorian poet Thomas Hardy presented a melancholic and tragic image of the plant and nature, a nature lacking this restorative power that Bate speaks of. “I had learnt the world was a welter of futile doing” Hardy writes in “In Tenebris III” (3), a poem composed in 1901. While Wordsworth sought restorative power in nature, Hardy sought a measurable and calculated exchange between humans and plants. In his autobiography, The Life and Work Thomas Hardy, composed by himself and his wife Florence Hardy, Hardy proposes a departure from Wordsworth’s fanciful turn to nature for restorative power. In the chapter “Observations on People and Things”, Hardy expresses that when faced with doubt, human kind will turn to one another, as this loss will “ultimately be brought about … by the pain we see in others reacting on ourselves, as if we and they were part of one body. Mankind, in fact, may be, and possibly will be, viewed as members of one corporeal frame” (235). For Hardy, loss is universal–something experienced by all beings.
Similar to this, Hardy’s plants are presented in his poetry in a cold and tragic manner, from the death of plants and flowers to the “dull” faces of the natural world. In “To Outer Nature” Hardy addresses nature directly, “Love alone had wrought thee … for my pleasure, / Planned thee as a measure” (5-7). While Wordsworth seeks nature for its vitality and agency—the capacity for the plant to cause an effect on the speaker—Hardy sees the bleak and tragic element in plants, the fragility of their existence and its similarities to human life. While Wordsworth turns to plants for a departure from human tragedy, Hardy situates the plant alongside the human as an equal, presenting both as beings who face mortality and experience melancholic loss, as less vibrant and vital elements of the environment.
There is a particular air of this kind of universal loss evident in Wordsworth, mirroring his own life. This makes the poetry and the two poets’ depictions of plants even more at odds with one another. As Wordsworth biographer Stephen Gill writes in his 2011 book Wordsworth’s Revisitings, the poet simply did not want to say goodbye, never wanted to think he was looking upon a natural landscape for the final time whether in person or in recollection:
Wordsworth could not bear to think that he had seen a place for the last time—the poignancy of his tour of Italy in 1837 comes largely from the knowledge that it was too late. Much longed-for the tour had no antecedent he could revisit and the poet knew he would not be back. How different were the West Country, Scotland, the Alps, and France. Repeatedly Wordsworth went back to places that had mattered to him as a man and as poet and tested his sense of the present and the intervening years in fresh acts of creation. (9)
If at his death in 1850 Wordsworth ever considered he would never again see ruins of Tintern Abbey, the rolling hills of Cumbria, Westmoreland, the calm summer reflection of rays of light upon Rydal Water, or the dancing daffodils near Grasmere, he certainly never expressed it directly. He never wrote with any hint of an acknowledgement of his own mortality ever keeping him from revisiting a place in person or on the page—never spoke of visiting a place for the last time. In his verse, there is always a feeling of revisiting, whether a present revisit or a far off imagined one. There is the element of plant mystery in some of Wordsworth’s work. His repeated returns to the same locations and the revisiting observation of plants comes across as a complicated expression of his inner emotions, his own way of expressing the unknown.
Hardy, in contrast, had no interest in returning or revisiting. In the introduction of his autobiography, Florence Dugdale [Hardy] expresses his disinterest in looking back on the history of his life. In a sense, it was only to correct mistakes published by other biographers that led Hardy to finally record his life. “Mr. Hardy’s feeling for a long time was that he would not care to have his life written at all,” Florence begins the prefatory note of the autobiography, “[a]nd though often asked to record his recollections”, she continues, “he would say that he ‘had not sufficient admiration for himself’ to do so” (3). Part of what makes Hardy’s nature a foil for Wordsworth’s is found in his attitude towards life, the futility of recollection and the attitude, as Harvey Curtis Webster expresses in On a Darkling Plain: The Art and Thought of Thomas Hardy that it was his early environment that “made him into a confirmed melancholic” (9).
Unlike Hardy, with his melancholic personality that caused his hesitation to recount the past, for Wordsworth, there was always another return, another recollection to be recounted. Nature had bewitched him from an early age, establishing the pull and desire he would later experience for the rest of his life and attempt to fully express. What makes this difference between the poets remarkable is that for Wordsworth, this attitude of the continuous flowing of life and thoughts appears in stark contrast to the real life experiences of his youth. Both Wordsworth and Hardy experienced great loss. For Hardy, it was his first wife Emma Gifford, who died in 1912 and is the subject of many of his nature poems.
Wordsworth was no stranger to loss. Having been born in the Lake District—one of five children—both Wordsworth’s mother and father died within six years of one another, leaving young William an orphan. His youth is riddled with grief and immeasurable loss, yet there is always a tone of hope in his adult verse. Where Hardy wrote of frozen greenhouses, dying plants, and the “aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small” (21) of “The Darkling Thrush”, Wordsworth wrote of dancing daffodils, lush leaves, and the “little cheerful Robin” (1) from “To A Redbreast”.
It is undeniable that there is an abundance of life in Wordsworth and Hardy. If one is to situate their attention on the companion of the human—the plant—the divergent depictions of various life within the landscapes of nature show the unique sentiments of the two poetical giants. The plant appears in Wordsworth as a vital and non-tragic being capable of causing effect upon the human observer and displaying a sense of independence, detached from the reliance on humans. In contrast, Hardy presents a melancholic and tragic nature. There exists a unique marriage between the cold sciences of life and death found in Hardy and the vital liveliness of the Romantic plant in Wordsworth.
Even from the work of Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin in “The Botanic Garden” and “The Love of Plants,” the idea of the world of cold plant science bleeding together with the pulse of personal human emotion was passed off as mere metaphysical reflections of the human in the nonhuman. This is largely due to the lack of language and understanding that came with the development of anthropocentrism and the rise of ecocriticism in the 1970s and onward. In his 2000 book Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology, Romantic scholar James C. McKusick expresses the role of poet in his careful positioning in relation to the natural world that he is observing, and his willingness to remove himself: “The place of poetry, and the task of the poet, is thus inherently dialogical; the poet must seek to engage those inhuman voices in conversation, at some risk to his own sense of identity, self-confidence, and stylistic decorum” (60-61). Theresa Kelley ruminates on the “hardly covert” (11) opinion of Romantic-era thinkers on these plant poems that “Botanical figures emphasized the implicit contradiction between an exultant yet naive celebration of the capacity to go gather and organize material nature and the persistent difficulty that beset efforts to do so” (11). Despite this, the desire of man is paramount to the development of the ecocriticism and study of plant life that we can now, in the year 2023, apply to the works of the Romantic era.
In Gibson and Brits’s Covert Plants there is a return to the problem of anthropocentrism, yet here a possible reasoning to the return is proposed: “We are limited in our understanding of how [plants] suggest a human-like intelligence because we can’t move out of our own human habitation towards plants. In other words, humans are so used to or conditioned ‘to know’ plants, and claim to understand the exceptionalism of human cognition, that it becomes difficult to step back and consider there might be a non-human intelligence outside human understanding. Humans remain confined by the associative powers of linguistics, limiting our views of non-signifying or non-semiotic intelligences,” she continues: “We simply don’t have the words to convey plant behavior” (20). This does not mean that Wordsworth and Hardy did not try, in their own ways, to define and depict plant behavior.
We understand and recognize now this almost primitive ecological school of thought that appeared in Wordsworth. Jonathan Bate writes the following astute observation on Wordsworth in his recent 2020 book Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World:
His body is still but in his head he is moving with the earth, as if he were one with the mysterious force to which, as he moves from narrative to philosophizing, he gives a sequence of names: ‘Presence of Nature’, ‘visions of the hills’, ‘souls of lonely places’. This will not be the only time that something profound, simultaneously comforting and terrifying, is conjured by Wordsworth’s collocation of those words ‘earth’, ‘rolled’, ‘motion’, ‘diurnal’ and ‘round’ (29)
As Bate alludes to the aforementioned Lucy poem with the use of “diurnal” Wordsworth himself mimics this movement of the natural world, mimicking the Earth with his bodies’ placement on the planet itself. As a human being on the Earth, his body moves and grows alongside the plants and the animals who grow and age. The same is found in Hardy, in his poem “Heredity” which expresses this similar diurnal round of the concept of time and human life: “Flesh perishes, I live on, / Projecting trait and trace / Through time to time anon, / And leaping from place to place” (2-5). For Wordsworth, the poetic plant is moving, vibrant, lively, while for Hardy, the poetic plant mirrors the decay of its human counterpart, yet both moving in unison with the heartbeat of the natural world.